Ray Kurzweil -- the guy who developed the world's first computer speech recognition programs, among about a billion other things -- has some pretty extraordinary predictions for what technology might soon be able to do for the human body.

"Like telling your cells they can let a few calories slide here and there."

Cory Doctorow opens his mouth, and nerdgasms
fall out: at any given moment, he's liable to be spouting off about
feral robot dogs, space domes over Disney World, or building a haunted
hotel modeled after a Quake level ("I'll open-source this idea," says he). And we'd expect nothing less -- after all, he's one of the superclocking brains behind BoingBoing, that exalted bestiary of sweet-ass geekdom.

Photo by Jenni Girtman; ganked from the Atlanta-Journal Constitution site

The man pictured above is Rufus Terrill, who owns a bar called "O'Terrill's" in Atlanta. That thing is a robot he built to fend off the various vagrants, thugs, drug dealers, and other such miscreants who terrorize his bar.